Claudia Pahl-Wostl

Die Landwirtschaft in Deutschland, Europa und weltweit befindet sich in einem dramatischen Umbruchprozess. Einerseits bieten Liberalisierung und Marktöffnung, neue technologische Entwicklungen, die wachsende Weltbevölkerung und neue Kundenwünsche vielen landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben neue Möglichkeiten. Andererseits stehen viele Landwirtinnen und Landwirte in internationaler Konkurrenz, sind zum betrieblichen Wachstum mit hohem Investitionsrisiko gezwungen, sind Teil strikt regulierter Wertschöpfungsketten und müssen steigenden gesellschaftlichen Ansprüchen genügen. Zugleich machen sich viele Menschen Sorgen, dass die Prozesse der Rationalisierung und Modernisierung der landwirtschaftlichen Produktion auf Kosten von Natur-, Umwelt- und Tierschutz gehen. Auf vielen Ebenen wird daher bereits nach einer neuen Verständigung darüber gesucht, was die Gesellschaft von der Landwirtschaft erwartet, und welche Unterstützung die Landwirtinnen und Landwirte im Gegenzug dafür erwarten dürfen. Vor diesem Hintergrund entwickelt das vorliegende Open Access-Buch eine wissenschaftlich fundierte Kritik der Umweltauswirkungen der Landwirtschaft und der politischen Logik der Agrarpolitik. Es präsentiert ein neues Leitbild mit konkreten Indikatoren sowie alternative strategische Handlungsoptionen. Die umfassende Analyse wird zu einem Vorschlag für eine neue Architektur der europäischen Agrarpolitik gebündelt, die eine breite Diskussion um einen Neuen Gesellschaftsvertrag für die Landwirtschaft in Deutschland und Europa anstoßen soll.

This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of multi-level water governance, developing a conceptual and analytical framework that captures the complexity of real water governance systems while also introducing different approaches to comparative analysis. Applications illustrate how the ostensibly conflicting goals of deriving general principles and of taking context-specific factors into account can be reconciled. Specific emphasis is given to governance reform, adaptive and transformative capacity and multi-level societal learning. The sustainable management of global water resources is one of the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st century. Many problems and barriers to improvement can be attributed to failures in governance rather than the resource base itself. At the same time our understanding of complex water governance systems largely remains limited and fragmented. The book offers an invaluable resource for all researchers working on water governance topics and for practitioners dealing with water governance challenges alike.

This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of multi-level water governance, developing a conceptual and analytical framework that captures the complexity of real water governance systems while also introducing different approaches to comparative analysis. Applications illustrate how the ostensibly conflicting goals of deriving general principles and of taking context-specific factors into account can be reconciled. Specific emphasis is given to governance reform, adaptive and transformative capacity and multi-level societal learning. The sustainable management of global water resources is one of the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st century. Many problems and barriers to improvement can be attributed to failures in governance rather than the resource base itself. At the same time our understanding of complex water governance systems largely remains limited and fragmented. The book offers an invaluable resource for all researchers working on water governance topics and for practitioners dealing with water governance challenges alike.

The world's human population now constitutes the largest driving force of changes to the biosphere. Emerging water challenges require new ideas for governance and management of water resources in the context of rapid global change. This book presents a new approach to water resources, addressing global sustainability and focusing on socio-ecological resilience to changes. Topics covered include the risks of unexpected change, human impacts and dependence on global water, the prospects for feeding the world's population by 2050, and a pathway for the future. The book's innovative and integrated approach links green and blue freshwater with terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem functions and use. It also links changes arising from land-use alteration with the impacts of those changes on social-ecological systems and ecosystem services. This is an important, state-of-the-art resource for academic researchers and water resource professionals, and a key reference for graduate students studying water resource governance and management.

The Adaptiveness of IWRM provides new insights and knowledge on the challenges and solutions that current water management faces in a situation of complexity and uncertainty. Drawing on the available results from a wide range of European research projects under several framework programmes, the book provides an overview of the state of the art in European research on Integrated Water Resources Management on the topics of Participation, Transboundary regimes, Economics, Vulnerability, Climate change, Advanced monitoring, Spatial planning, and the Social dimensions of water management. The achievements of EU research projects are considered in view of the extent to which IWRM responds to the current complexity and uncertainty water management is facing. These achievements are positioned in a wider context of worldwide developments in the respective topics which account for the future challenges. From this, the book concludes with the required focus of European research in the near future and promotes the concept of Adaptive Water Management as the preferred direction for the development of IWRM. The book presents the achievements of European IWRM research on a range of water management topics and offers conclusions and recommendations for research foci that will be invaluable to water managers, policy-makers and academic researchers working in the field of IWRM.

The author presents the argument that it is the trade-off between the irregular, chaotic dynamics at the level of populations and the spatio-temporal organization at the level of the system as a whole that shapes ecological systems. This book combines the topics of theoretical analysis, natural science, philosophy and fundamental ecology in a synthetic treatment. Outlines a coherent framework to delineate the internal structure of ecological networks along the dimensions of time, space and function in the network context. Introduces mathematical tools to describe and quantify the functional importance of spatial and temporal patterns in ecological networks for ecosystem organization.